Tuesday, January 30, 2018

WSPR Beacon On Air from Antarctica


Germany's Neumayer III Antarctic Research Station
(via Wikimedia Commons)


It is well-known that radio propagation around the north and south poles is quite different from other parts of the world, and now a joint project of Germany's Deutscher Amateur Radio Club (DARC), the Technical University of Munich and the University of Bremen will attempt to document those differences using WSPR - or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter - technology. 

The ARRL Letter reports that ham researchers in Antarctica have installed a multiband WSPR transmitter as well as a multiband receiver at the Neumayer III Research Station. The receiver can simultaneously monitor up to eight bands between 160 and 6 meters and feed several hundred reports each hour to the WSPRnet website. 

QSL card from a previous amateur operation at the Neumayer
station (via DX News). DH5CW plans to operate from there
for a year, beginning in February 2018.
The station is using the callsign DP0GVN; the call will also be used for realtime HF QSOs by researcher Matthias Maasch, DH5CW, who is scheduled to arrive at the station in February for a one-year deployment.